Screen blank during boot up

[colinjava]

Hi,

When I boot into windows xp, the screen is black, and the monitor kind of goes to sleep, then awake then to sleep, but remains black.
Then when its booted up, the screen appears.
During resets, sometimes you can see the windows screen as it loads, sometimes not.

So I put the problem down to 4 things:

1. Mobo
2. Graphics Card
3. Monitor
4. PSU

I've tried monitor on my P4, and theres no problem there, but also I tried an old 17" TRT (only on/off, no sleep options) monitor on computer and this was fine, but as the monitor works with P4, I guess the monitor is not problem.

I've got a feeling its the motherboard, cuz I think the problem started after the PSU exploded.

Its not a bad problem, I can still get into BIOS, but sometimes its nice to see what its saying incase theres a problem, but I can't, its just a black screen.

I have no way to test the graphics card, cause my P4 uses VGA, not PCI, and I have no other graphics card.

Is there anything I can do to test anything? It seems hard to find a Biostar TPower I45 motherboard on internet to replace it, maybe they don't make em anymore, its a very nice board for overclocking, and cause I got an E8600 which I run at 3.7-4GHz (depending on season) I don't really need to upgrade to an i7 or anything.

I could always buy another LGA775 board, but a good one would be like £100-£200 which I can't justify just cause of a black screen at startup.

Any thoughts are welcome.

 

[Old Hippie]

I've seen some MBs with options in the BIOS settings that allow for "Quick Booting" or making some start-up screens blank.

Try checking the BIOS for anything related to those items.